McCrae &Costa’s Five-Factor model of personality has become the dominant conception of personality structure (1985, 1987, and 1997). The Big Five Personality traits are said to be predictive of some kinds of behaviour such as honesty, job performance, and procrastination.
Critically discuss the relevance of this understanding of personality to Occupational Testing.
McCrae and Costa’s Five-Factor model of personality is said to be predictive in certain behaviours such as honesty, job performance and procrastination. This Five-Factor model applies to organisational testing because personality is a crucial part in understanding the interests and abilities of an applicant within a business. There have been several criticisms of the Big Five and how accurately it can describe a person’s future performance. These criticisms will be discussed in length in this essay. The essay will also consider the usefulness of the Big Five within psychological assessments.
Personality can be defined as “the dynamic organisation of systems that determine the individual’s characteristic patterns of behaviour, thought, and feeling” (Sibaya & Nicholas, Personality, 2008). Simply put one can describe personality as the aspects of a person which make them unique (Sibaya & Malcolm, 2003). Personality attributes have successfully been studied over centauries and investigators have concluded that the personality domain can be best described by five “super ordinate constructs” (Digman, 1990).
A personality trait is “a durable disposition to behave in a particular way” and the five-factor model has become the dominant idea of a personality structure (Weiten, 2007). The five-factor model of personality came about as a result of Hans Eysenck’s two dimensions of personality. Eysenck’s theory comprised of neuroticism-stability and extraversion-introversion and he later added the third dimension known as psychoticism (Sibaya & Malcolm, 2003). Eysenck’s